


Five Times They Touch

by Nao



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, jon and sansa are not especially well-adjusted people, season 6
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-13
Updated: 2019-03-13
Packaged: 2019-11-16 11:44:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18093665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nao/pseuds/Nao
Summary: She doesn’t touch him for days.  Weeks.  They travel from keep to stronghold, living in close quarters as they’d never done even as children.  She is so close, but an icy veneer has covered the exhausted girl he’d started to know, and they can hardly exchange a good morning without it evolving into an argument.





	Five Times They Touch

One. 

 

The first time she touches him, a fire starts where his heart had been.  He clutches her tight, heedless of the onlookers, consumed by her face, the paleness, the coat of dirt and grime.  By her hair, muted embers.  By the warmth of her, when a day past he had been as cold as the ground under his feet.

He whisks her away, up to the room that had been his— was still his— and corrals all the men of the Watch into caring for Sansa’s needs.  The horses are stabled, the knight and her squire are put to bed in adjoining chambers, hot broth in their bellies.  By the time, he’s done with arranging, Sansa has peeked around the edge of the outer door looking for him.  

He’d not meant to stare at her, but the curve of her cheek, the glint of her eyes in the firelight, her hands, stronger now but still tapered and elegant, drew him.  It was all he could do to keep his arse on the stool and his feet on the floor.  Of course that’s when it’s ruined.  Happiness never lasts long.  

Two.

 

Her hand is on his, pulled across the length of the table and held tight.  Sansa stares at him, pleading with her eyes for him to see things her way, to do what she’s argued for him to do, every day of the fortnight she’s been here.   

The heat of her skin over his unbalances him, and he’s reminded of the way it felt to hold her.  The line of her body pressed to his, his heart had near burst.  He had felt alive.  As he did now.  Jerkily, he nods, consenting to another series of battles, another chance to dole out death in a war that mattered and somehow didn’t.  

She lets go his hand slowly, reluctantly, smile contrasting with the silent tears tracking down her face.  His stomach twisted over on itself.  Perhaps this war mattered after all.   

 

Three.

 

She doesn’t touch him for days.  Weeks.  They travel from keep to stronghold, living in close quarters as they’d never done even as children.  She is so close, but an icy veneer has covered the exhausted girl he’d started to know, and they can hardly exchange a good morning without it evolving into an argument.  

Still, one night it is so cold and too far from one castle to the next that Jon calls an early halt and keeps Sansa with him for the night.  In his tent, Sansa twists her gloved hands together, eyes distant and far seeing.  When he tugs his camp bed close to the fire and settles onto it, booted feet extended out and a mountain of blankets around him, he counts his blessings that it makes her smile.  She settles beside him, he covers her with quilts and they huddle together in front of the fire until day breaks.  

The next morning, they burrow out of the quilt tent, grinning at each other like fools.  When she wraps her arm around his and convinces him to ride for Glover next instead of Mazin, Jon doesn’t realize until they are well on their way how much of a complete idiot he is around her.  She rides a little behind him, like the perfectly trained lady she was raised to be, and suddenly Jon thinks of something he heard her Septa say before it all.   _A lady’s armor is her courtesy._

 

Four.

 

He doesn’t come close to her, wary and worried. Did she trust him so little that she resorted to touch and flattery to get her way?  Is this what she had been forced into doing in Kings Landing?  His thoughts swirl ceaselessly, aimlessly, until the battle, until Rickon, until Sansa comes to him, pale faced, apple cheeked and blue eyes like glittering stars to tell him that Ramsay is dead. 

Jon approaches and stops in front of her.  Arms distance and no closer until he finds out what it means that Sansa touches him and he obeys.  If he could say no to Melisandre, what was so different that he could not bring himself to think with his mind with Sansa?  It niggled at him, an itch he couldn’t scratch.  

“Jon,” and her voice is the same low rasp that reminds him of her mother.  “I don’t feel bad about it.”

He replies, repeating their father’s words, “You passed the sentence and swung the sword.  You and the whole of the North know that he would have destroyed us all.  Get to the godswood and pray if you must, but never feel guilty.”  He rocks forward toward her and stops himself.  Her eyes, softer, look away from him.  “I don’t pray.  But I will look after Rickon tonight.  One of us should be with him.”

Jon nods and watches her walk away.  He has his own work through the night to keep his hands busy while his thoughts churn.  Stores to count, soldiers to care for, but when he sees her the next morning, after Melisandre and Davos, he kisses her.  It is a test.  

He knows he will feel something.  He knows his heart will race, his skin will tingle, but if she makes a request of him in that moment, then perhaps she is not to be trusted after all.  When she doesn’t, he feels the shame spread through him like a white hot lick of flame.  He is the turn-cloak, the bastard, the liar, not her.  All Sansa wanted was her family back.  If she touches him, if she trusts him enough to touch him, and he makes more of it than he ought, how could that fault, that sin, be placed on her head?   

He leaves her, somehow managing to make her smile, but inside is sickened.  Is this what his father had raised him to be?  Suspicious and cruel-hearted?  Unfair and self-centered?  He walks, and walks, and walks castigating himself until the horns sound and the gates close on the last of their bannermen come to celebrate the return of Winterfell to its rightful family.  

When the lords of the North choose him as their leader, he is lost until he looks at Sansa.  She smiles, so bright and pure, that he silently makes anew his promise to protect her.  Even from himself.

 

Five.  

 

“You give me the North—,” Sansa began and Jon spoke over her.  

“I cannot give what was never mine.  I will do what I must to convince her to bring her forces North, dragons and all, but I may not return.  And if I don’t, you must lead them.”  He looked at her, trying to memorize the way her eyes pierced.  When she approached, and laid a hand on his arm, beseeching, even so late, Jon smiled.  

“I must go, as soon as the sun is full up.”

Sansa ignored his words, hand tightening slightly before she dropped it and moved away to sit, hands clasped tight over her lap.  “Why is it,” she said, grumbling, “that when I need it to work it doesn’t?”

Jon blinked at her, feeling as though he’d been axed on the head.  “What?”

“Never mind,” Sansa replied, throwing him a glance so full of vitriol, Jon rocked back on his toes.  His mind raced, tripping over the days and nights spent at her side, pressed close together, hands touching, her hair on his shoulder, working together on rebuilding their home.  He remembered the battlements after the battle and the confusion in her eyes as he’d kissed her, and the look in her eye as she called him back to tell him about the raven.

“It was all on purpose,” Jon said, flat.  He dropped into the other chair and stared at her.  Sansa sustained the look and responded slowly. “If by purpose, you mean getting you to listen to me and not setting me to knitting in a tower, then yes.”  She gripped her fingers tighter together, until the beds grew white with strain.  

“You trust me very little,” Jon began, “if you think that because you are a woman I’ll ignore your counsel.  I’ve done nothing but listen to your advice!  I don’t need to be manipulated and petted like a dog to see matters your way.”  He jumped up from the chair and pushed it away squealing across the flags.  Jon paced away toward her desk and back.  

“I’ve never met a man who listened to me, before you.  And even you are consumed by this need to protect me from the ills of the world, never mind that I have seen all manner of evil from King’s Landing to our very door.  You forget that I am not the stupid little girl you knew.”

“But I’m your brother Sansa,” Jon nearly cried the words, horrified at her and himself.   

“You are, and for that reason alone I trust you with my life above all others.  But I will not let the fact that you are my brother and my King stop me from making sure you live to see another day.  Because you are a fool Jon.  You trust too readily, and give everyone rope to hang _you_  with.”

She met his eyes as he stopped in front of her, unaffected but for the twisting of her hands. 

“Fine,” he shrugged, anger warring with something like relief, “then to tell it true, I suspected you to be playing me like a harp before we’d even won Winterfell back.  But I... I reconsidered and was ashamed of myself.”  He paused, swallowing.  “I thought it was my bastard blood that had made me so distrusting of you.  That I was ill-made to long for your touch, to grow silly for it.”

Her face changed incrementally.  Her mouth softened and the icy veneer, the one that hardly broke these latter months fell clean away.  “You are no more ill-made than I am, no dirtier than I am.  I touched you because I wanted you close.  I refused to be afraid of men, after Joffrey and Ramsay and all the others, but with you I was afraid in a different way.  What if you were lost to me?  What if you swore to protect me, rode off to battle on my behalf and never returned?  What if you made some misstep with the lords, some gaffe that could not be recovered?”  Her eyes glittered and in the flickering light, he could see the track of tears sliding down her face.  

“I would do anything to make sure you don’t die again.  I will lie, cheat, steal, and kill if I must.  I would do anything,” she repeated and bowed her head.  A sniff broke the silence that fell, and Jon realized that whatever anger he’d had was as misplaced as it had been when he’d kissed her.  They were both terrible.  

“I am sorry to leave you, but if you can bear it, perhaps you can lay your hands on me again.  I think we both need something to remember each other by, if the worst comes to pass.”  Jon opened his arms, and after a long moment, Sansa rose and wrapped herself around him.  He wound his hands around her waist, squeezing her to him.  If he had to die again, at least he’d had this, wrongheaded though it was.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by an ask on tumblr that the very amazing fortunatelylori let me build on. Please be kind if you review.


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